It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many, many hundreds of miles.
Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On board the _Primrose_ the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to have neither chart nor compass."
"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day. At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of reindeer moss (_cladonia rangiferina_?), the _tripe de roche_ of the North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and tonic.